The Far-Off Land: An Attempt at a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug-Experience.

By Eric Hendrickson

Provocative and Enlightening Book Dissects the Human Consciousness
The Far-Off Land philosophically evaluates the hallucinogenic drug-experience and
intends to collect the perspectives of philosophy for better understanding of the human
consciousness,
Eugene Seaich attempts to dissect the human consciousness to
provoke and enlighten the readers mind in The Far-Off Land, a revealing book that presents a philosophical
evaluation of the hallucinogenic drug-experience.
This book is a cerebral piece of literature that attempts to discover the broader realities that lie behind
psychogenic phenomena and seek a pattern that will explain the longing of human being for the Beyond, for the
otherworldly substance of their intuition. Seaich will take readers on a trip through millennia, offer them
glimpses of the forthcoming and explore deeper his own psycheand experiences with LSD and mescalinein
order for them to discover a more profound and broader understanding of the mind and human consciousness.
Guided by a cardinal principle, Seaich captures the philosophical prospects and covers a great background of
other relevant fields of study that promote psychotropic knowledge to better understand human consciousness
and to ultimately improve humanitys cure to mental illness and even solve lifes mysteries.
Filled with tremendous meaning and insight, revelations and wisdom, historical facts and quotes from the
worlds greatest minds and literature, The Far-Off Land is an intelligent and poetic prose that will inform
readers about human consciousness and inspire them about life, including its complexities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477143988

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Eric Hendrickson.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012912674

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4771-4397-1

Softcover 978-1-4771-4396-4

Ebook 978-1-4771-4398-8

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Contents

Introduction

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. . . need I dread from thee

harsh judgments, if the song be loth to

quit

Those recollected hours that have the charm

of visionary things, those lovely forms

and sweet sensations that throw back our life,

and almost make remotest infancy

A visible scene, on which the sun is shinin

(Wordsworth, The Prelude)

Und nach so leidgetrSnkten Jahren

Die so vieles uns zerstttrt,

V/ird der Welt, die wir einst waren,

Sage imraer noch pehbrt.

Ihre Runen werden bleicher,

Ihre Tone fern und zart,

Doch sie hat in zauberreicher

Anmut ewige Gepenwart.

And after years of suffering

Which destroyed so much in us,

There will always sound the legend

Of a world which once we knew.

Its runes are pale and faded,

Its music faint and far;

Yet its presence lives forever

With eternal magic charm.

(Hermann Hesse, Spate Gedichte)

J’ai longtemps habite sous de vastes portiques

Que les soleils marins teignaient de mille feux,

Et que leurs grands piliers, droits et majesteuex,

Rendaient pareils, le soir, aux grottes basaltiques.

Les houles, en roulant les images des cleux,

Melaient d’une fapon solennelle et mystique

Aux couleurs du couchant reflete par mes yeux.

C’est la que j’ai vecu dans les voluptes calmes,

Au milieu de l’azur, des vagues, des splendeurs

Et des esclaves nus, tout impregnes d’odeurs,

Qui me rafralchissaient le front avec des palmes,

Et dont l’unique soin etait d’approfondir

Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir.

(Once on a time I lived in might vaults

which ocean suns stained with a thousand gleams;

their straight majestic columns made them seem

as evening deep grottoes of basalt.

The billows, tossing images of skies,

mingled in a solemn mystic mode

their music’s powerful harmonies which glowed

with their sunset hues reflected to my eyes.

And there I dwelt among voluptuous calms,

in the midst of azure, splendor, and the waves,

and the heavy perfumes of the naked slaves

who cooled my forehead with slow fronds of palm,

and whose only duty was to seek

the hidden sorrows that had made me sick.)

(Baudelaire, La Vie Anterieure, A Former Life)

Introduction

When the Spaniards entered Mexico in the early sixteenth century, they found the natives using a family of strange new drugs, unlike any they had known before. The Aztecs had given one of them the name, Teonanacatl (The Flesh of the God) in honor of its miraculous properties, which enabled one to see visions, to foretell the future, and to obtain supernatural revelation. Farther north, the Conquistadors discovered a cult surrounding a mysterious, turnip-shaped cactus, almost indistinguishable from the stones of the desert, which enabled its users to behold the secrets of the universe. Duly noting the properties of these drugs, the Spaniards succeeded in stamping out their use. Through the centuries, they remained all but forgotten, until in the last century settlers in the American Southwest observed that the cult of the peyote cactus still survived among certain Indians, although in an altered form. As they became converted to Christianity, these tribes adapted their worship of the magic plant to its celebration as a Sacrament; in its new form, the cult spread as far north as Canada and is today incorporated as the Native American Church of the United States.

Men of letters learned of peyote after the middle of the nineteenth century. Its properties were exploded by cultured Europeans, such as Havelock Ellis and Alexandre Rouhier, who discovered for themselves the marvelous visions that the drug produced. The German pharmacologist A. Heffter finally isolated an active chemical from the plant, which was called mescaline.

In the meantime, confusion reigned among historians regarding the descriptions of the other Aztec drugs. In 1923, Dr. Blas Pablo Reko discovered that the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, was still employed by Indians deep in the mountains of Oaxaca. Subsequent investigators established the identity of the ololiuqui, or the seeds of a narcotic bindweed, employed by the Mazatec tribe.

In 1943, a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, accidentally absorbed through his fingers a minute quantity of a powerful synthetic substance, which caused him to behold the same sort of visions produced by the ancient American drugs. It received the designation LSD-25 (for d-Lysergic acid diethylamide, the twenty-fifth of a series of chemicals being investigated). Since that time, a number of other synthetic drugs, capable of producing hallucinations, have been created, including DMT (diethyl tryptamine), T-9 (diethyl tryptamine), and adrenolutin, which closely resembles the metabolic hormones of the human body. In 1959, the sacred mushroom yielded its secret in the form of the drug psilocybin, a relative of the tryptamines mentioned above, and its psychogenic ally active precursor psilocin. Most recently (1960), the ololiuqui has been found to contain an isomeric form of lysergic acid, isolysergic acid amide, which possesses the same properties as LSD.

Ever since mescaline became available, the close resemblance between its effects and the symptoms of schizophrenia has been noted. In a classic study of the mescaline psychosis, Tayleur Stockings (1940) observed that both paranoia and catatonia can be produced by administration of the drug. Psychiatrists and pharmacological researchers have accordingly suggested that mescaline, LSD, and related chemicals might provide a clue to the nature of insanity. Many studies have been made, and continue to be made, in hopes that an ultimate cure for mental illness might be found.

But, other studies of the human mind await the application of hallucinogenic tools, studies that might prove even stranger and more illuminating than those of the pharmacological laboratory.

Deep within each of us, the past slumbers on. All of the patterns of our understanding lie buried in the unconscious memory, shaping our desires, our inspirations, and our dreams. It is these ancient memories, particularly those at the deepest level of the organism, that perpetually appear as haunting suggestions of a prior existence, or a higher reality, which prefigures our picture of human life. This vast residue of mental experience is what the Greeks recognized as the daimon, or the sense of destiny that drives our conscious energies toward their necessary fulfillment. As an active repository of intuitive knowledge, it integrates and guides our understanding of reality; whatever we know, or feel, or hope to attain is rooted in its primal soil.

It has seemed to me that the well-established properties of the hallucinogenic drugs might be well employed to enable us to explore this far-off land, which is in effect our subconscious mind. Were we to learn its secrets, we would better understand our own desires and the motives that drive us through life. Still better, the secrets of human history would perhaps be discovered as the eternal patterns of imagination that have shaped our spiritual existence. But, perhaps most important of all, to penetrate the well of the past might restore to us that visionary perception that we think we once possessed. Legend and myth are curiously persistent in their suggestion that the human race formerly enjoyed the delights of paradise; actually, I believe that this paradise has been fashioned perennially by each of us from his own recollection of life’s initial innocence, and therefore awaits recreation from the depths of primal memory. If this is true, the strange drugs that the Indians left to us might prove to be the very Hermetic Secret sought after by the alchemists.

In the study that follows, I have attempted solely